Historic High View Park in North Arlington was the site of this year’s annual MSMJ Youth Foundation community event, hosted by former Yorktown High School football standout and current NFL player M.J. Stewart and his family.
The event included activities for children, music, food and drink and a celebration of the Halls Hill neighborhood.
The Yorktown Patriots extended their girls softball season with victories over the Herndon Hornets and Langley Saxons in the Liberty District tournament.
Third-seed Yorktown (12-11) topped sixth-seeded Herndon, 10-5, in the first round, then upset and blanked second-seed and Langley Saxons, 5-0, in the semifinals to extend the high-school team’s winning streak to five.
When Eddie Kaufholz and his family moved to Arlington nearly five years ago, they were not thinking about starting a business. They wanted to live in a place that was diverse, interesting and full of opportunity, with a school system they could rely on. Arlington fit.
In the years that followed, working out of a home office off Columbia Pike, he consulted with organizations across Northern Virginia and around the country: nonprofits, advocacy groups, mid-sized companies, agencies of various sizes. The work itself was good. But somewhere across all those projects, he started to notice a pattern.
”The agency model has gotten really bloated,” Kaufholz says. ”Layers, handoffs, middle management. The senior people who pitch the work often disappear once it starts. The idea with PILLAR was to strip all of that down; keep senior people on the work, approach each client with humility and care, do world-class strategy and execution, and pass the efficiency back to the client instead of absorbing it as agency margin.”
That thinking, slowly, became PILLAR, the Arlington-headquartered creative, communications and marketing agency Kaufholz founded.
PILLAR, he says, is built on an old idea. ”An idea that has always been possible but rarely practiced: that an agency should be structured to serve the work itself.” The team that delivers the work is assembled around the specific needs of each client and only stays as long as the work calls for them.
”The senior strategist on your kick-off call is the senior strategist writing your messaging,” Kaufholz says. ”Every person on a project is there because the work specifically calls for them.”
PILLAR’s recent work has spanned human rights, executive leadership, higher education, advocacy and direct-to-consumer ecommerce. The roster has included national nonprofits, a national multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer brand and a number of institutions navigating significant moments of strategic change. The model is built to scale up to be the agency of record for a national brand, or to scale down to design a logo for a neighborhood nonprofit. PILLAR takes equal pride and care in both.
What Kaufholz did not understand when he started, he said, was how much the County itself would matter in making any of it possible. (more…)
Make it a baker’s dozen — 13 — consecutive state softball championships for the Bishop O’Connell Knights.
The top seed and undefeated girls high-school team (20-0) captured its 13th straight Division I private-school crown by nipping the second-seeded St. Catherine’s Saints of Richmond, 1-0, in the 2025 tournament final in a season-ending victory.
This Memorial Weekend: Argentine Festival USA Returns May 23
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS:
Alberto Starace has has accumulated many achievements as a high-school soccer coach.
Now, Bishop O’Connell Knights‘ head girls coach can add to the list his selection to the Arlington Sports Hall of Fame.
A collaborative Summer Solstice gathering hosted by Inner Seasons and Spiritual Enhancements.
The Summer Solstice marks the peak of the sun’s power, the moment in the Wheel of the Year when light is at its fullest expression. In many traditions, this is the season of radiance, visibility, and creative fire. It is the time when nature stands unapologetically in her fullness, inviting us to do the same.
Still working to become further established in just its fourth season as a college softball team, the Marymount University Saints have won a significant championship.
The Division III women’s team this spring became the best in the Atlantic East Conference by winning the postseason tournament for the first time, earning the squad its initial NCAA-tourney berth.
As usual, Gabi Netwell was plenty busy during a track-and-field meet, most recently helping the Washington-Liberty Generals finish first in the girls Liberty District outdoor high-school championships.
The junior placed high in seven events as the Generals won with 118 points, just six more than the co-runner-ups Wakefield Warriors and Langley Saxons. The meet was held on two days over two weeks at Wakefield.
Golfers from two Arlington high school teams recently participated in a competition, aiming to advance in the qualifying process to earn a spot to play in this summer’s U.S. Open championship in Pennsylvania.
Finn Watson from Washington-Liberty High School and Logan Reilly from Bishop O’Connell High played in the U.S. Open 18-hole local qualifying tournament at Northwest Golf Course near Silver Spring.
It took four seasons and a lot of determination, but Arlington resident Josie Whitaker achieved a goal of amassing 400 career strikeouts.
The senior right-handed pitcher for the Thomas Jefferson Colonials girls high-school softball team reached that milestone in the team’s semifinal loss to the Hayfield Hawks in the National District tournament.
Of the 50 athletes participating in the outdoor track-and-field league championships for the Bishop O’Connell Knights, sprinter Cam Bowser was the top performer.
The junior won the boys 400-meters in a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference high-school meet record of 47.7 seconds, was second in the 200 (21.59) and ran on the third-place 4×200 relay at Good Counsel School in Maryland.
